Jan 28, 2011 20:31 GMT  ·  By

During a press event that took place in Singapore this week AMD has showcased a 5W version of its dual-core Ontario C-50 APU that is especially designed to be used in tablets and other low power devices.

Introduced at the beginning of this month during CES 2011, the Ontario C-50 APU is part of AMD's Fusion family of chips that pairs together one or more Bobcat computing cores with a on-die GPU.

This approach allows for decreased power consumption without giving up on performance, a regular dual-core Ontario C-50 APU requiring only 9W in order to function.

However, when compared to the ARM solutions that usually find their way inside tablets, AMD's APU is still far too power hungry to be a viable alternative, so the Sunnyvale-based company developed an even more energy efficient version of their Ontario C-50 processor.

This new low power C-50 APU requires only 5W to function, packs about the same feature set as its more power hungry sibling, and uses the same 1GHz operating frequency.

In case you were wondering how AMD has managed to achieve this feat, the answer in pretty simple.

Before designing the new ULV Ontario C-50 APU, the company analyzed the hardware requirements of tablets and other low power computing devices and realized that some of the features that were available in the Brazos platform weren't needed in this environment.

As a result, the 5W Ontario APU received a simpler memory controller that supports a limited number of frequencies and terminations as well as fewer peripheral ports (such as USB), and video outputs.

According to the PC Watch publication, Acer is already planning to use this chip in an upcoming tablet that will run Windows 7, a prototype of this device being showcased by the Taiwanese company during CES 2011.